'Seventeen Days' not enough to write album

With three hit songs and multiple music award nominations under their belt thanks to their last two radio-friendly LPs, Escatawpa, Miss. quartet 3 Doors Down continues to record rock for the working man on their latest release, Seventeen Days; an album as pedestrian as it is superficially earnest.\nBetween gigs buttering up Bush supporters this past autumn alongside the likes of Hilary Duff and JoJo, lead singer Brad Arnold and his bandmates took the time to pen such trite lines as "despite of all this weather, I know why we are together" and "I'll use your light to guide the way, 'cause all I think about is you" and accompany them with the typically stalwart Southern-rock-meets-post-grunge sound that made them radio, if not critical, darlings back in early 2000.\nThe album's title refers literally to how long it took the band to write the 13 songs on it, and for some reason, they seem proud of this fact. The preordained hits "Landing in London" and "Let Me Go" will stick in your brain as unrelentingly as "Kryptonite" did back in the old days, but most of the other tracks come off as ham-fisted, one-note love letters or empty hard knock life laments aimed, Skynyrd-style, directly at the blue-collar masses.\nSeventeen Days suffers primarily because it feels like a set list from a band going through the motions in terms of songwriting. Due to their uniform similarity, many of the tracks bleed into one another until they are often nearly indistinguishable. The band certainly has a formula that works in terms of corporate rock radio play and pick-up truck playability, but said formula seems to have worn out its welcome among the post-grunge set.\nEndless comparisons to bands like Creed and Matchbox Twenty have always been pervasive, but 3 Doors Down are neither as flamboyantly pious as Scott Stapp and company nor do they employ a songwriter as accomplished as Rob Thomas. \nUltimately, Seventeen Days is radio-friendly corporate rock that's sure to propel 3 Doors Down into once again filling Clear Channel amphitheaters nationwide, yet some of us can't help but wish bands like this would show at least a glimmer of creative maturity, especially over a period of five years. When a band admits to rushing their own record, can that really be expected?